Norkom signs major anti-money laundering deal


3 Mar 2005

One of the world’s largest providers of domestic and cross-border settlement services for bond, equity and fund transactions has selected Irish tech firm Norkom’s anti-money laundering (AML) technology.

Euroclear said it will use the technology for account and customer monitoring, behaviour analysis and watch-list matching.

This system will be implemented to enable Euroclear to screen all transactions against industry-standard watch lists and monitor all transactions for suspicious behaviour.

The total value of securities transactions settled by Euroclear is in excess of €300 trillion per annum, while assets held for clients are valued at more than €13 trillion.

According to recent research from the TowerGroup, a leading research and advisory group for the global financial services industry, financial crime is costing the industry billions of dollars globally per year in operational losses with untold costs in terms of lost reputation and consumer confidence.

“Whereas we saw an early uptake of AML technology in the retail banking payments space, we now see that the convergence of the increase in crime rates and the growing demands of compliance regulations is driving the securities processing industry as well to seek out and implement technology solutions, such as AML, that can help them stop the haemorrhaging of losses and meet the challenges of industry regulations,” said Virginia Garcia, senior analyst for financial services strategies and IT Investments at TowerGroup.

Paul Kerley, CEO of Norkom Group, said that the collaboration with Euroclear is the first big success since the integration of the new European operations within the Norkom group following the company’s acquisition of Data4s and validates the strategy the company has taken.

By John Kennedy